"As every reader not living under a rock now knows, the novelist Rachel Cusk has written about her separation from her husband … Passages have been reprinted, quoted, and quarrelled over so much that it is now not just a memoir but a scandal." Amanda Craigin the Independent joined the Aftermath fray: "Her exacting, cerebral treatment of such a highly-charged subject is what makes it of literary value," but the "prurient will be disappointed, and the distressed, unenlightened." Camilla Long had fun with it in the Sunday Times, describing the book as "simply bizarre": "She describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail … Cusk herself seems extraordinary – a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. And while I know some readers will find comfort in her searing, elegiac words, and her 'painfully honest' but extremely fetching dismemberment of personal despair, she leaves out too much narrative detail for me …This is a pity, as confessional writing is meant to be about truth – the whole truth." Cusk uses the memoir form "with great tact and writerly panache", enthused Lisa Appignanesi in the Daily Telegraph: "If her probing is sometimes clinical, it is also full of beauty – the beauty of language struggling to reveal an experience which is complex and scored with doubts and pain."

There seemed a general consensus that Peter Ackroyd's Wilkie Collins was not up to his best. John Prestonin the Evening Standard thought it seemed to have been written "in a bit of a trance": "It chugs along in one gear – a bit of biography followed by a synopsis of a novel, then some more biography – without ever flaring into life or throwing out any startling insights." In the Independent on Sunday, DJ Taylor reminisced: "Only the other day, in a box in the study, I turned up a sheaf of cuttings snipped out of the Spectator in the days when Peter Ackroyd wrote its weekly novel review. Incendiary stuff they were … Of course, Ackroyd doesn't write like that now … the tone of item No 5 in his series of 'short biographies', is incorrigibly sedate." The Sunday Times's John Carey pointed out that "It is not entirely clear that another biography of Collins is needed, since Ackroyd's book, though short and enthusiastic, makes no real advance on Catherine Peters's comprehensive and beautifully written The King of Inventors, published in 1993."

"Jerry White has been unpeeling the history of London in a trilogy of wonderful books that started with the 20th century and has now reached its final volume in the 18th century. It's the juiciest instalment so far in this page-turner biography of the capital, full of amazing facts and anecdotes, a book that anyone wanting food for thought about social history or human nature will treasure." Claire Harman's enthusiasm for London in the Eighteenth Century, expressed in the Evening Standard, wasn't shared by the Spectator'sKate Chisholm, who felt the organisation of the book into themes was merely "an enterprising way to marshal such detailed and fact-filled research. It is, though, a little strange to discuss power through the life of the notorious John Wilkes …" Though "he sometimes overpowers the reader with detail," argued Andrew Holgate, the Sunday Times's literary editor, "White is often superb at summoning up … the city's sheer raw energy. Sober yet incisive in his assessments, comprehensive in his coverage, and gimlet-eyed in his choice of detail, he offers an invigorating yet thoughtful tour through London's most extraordinary and bracing of centuries."